#Commentary of Valery Skorokhodov on how West politicizes sports

07.07.2017

A new portion of documents proving the hypocrisy and political bias of the leadership of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been published. This time, the mail of the International Association of Athletics Federations staff (IAAF) was hacked.

The published letters contain information about the use of illegal drugs by a four-time Olympic champion from the United Kingdom, ‘treatment’ with similar drugs of a female American runner, and about the violations with which doping control procedures are conducted.

It should be assumed that nothing terrible for the world sports movement did not happen, because the IAAF has already apologized to the athletes for the fact that their personal data has leaked. And they do not want to apologize for anything else and, naturally, answer for their actions?

My colleague has already commented on the situation about well-known athletes resorting tp doping, which WADA justifies rare diseases, depressions and mismatches of the names of banned drugs. Nevertheless, Western media and human rights organizations do not want to discuss the selective approach of the World Anti-Doping Agency. It seems that the world sports community is quite happy with such a mechanism with the help of which it is possible to eliminate competitors in the form of the entire national team, to apply doping without consequences, to violate the principle of “Sport is outside politics” at a convenient opportunity.

The People’s Republics also faced the fact that in sport, merits can be given and taken away not for sporting achievements or violations, but for the ‘correct’ or ‘wrong civic position. Thus, the four-time World Powerlifting Champion Maryana Naumova was deprived of the title of the Master of Sports of Ukraine “for a trip to the territory controlled by the separatists” (at that time she was 15 years old). By the way, politicization did not bypass science, when 12 teachers from the Donbass were deprived of titles and academic degrees.

If such situations occurred in one of the Western countries, then a court would inevitably follow. And I am sure that the actions of gentlemen from WADA will sooner or later be condemned by the sports community, because in sport from time immemorial there are absolutely different principles that have turned out to be alien to Western politicians, who, I hope, will not succeed in destroying the sports world.